In AI, Just as in Any Tech Project, Failing Doesn’t Mean Calling It Quits
This article highlights the key reasons for AI project failures and suggests strategies for success.
Nevertheless, market forecasts reflect enterprise optimism about ML. According to Statista, the global machine learning market grew nearly 120% in 2023 (from a staggering 46% drop in 2022), amounting to around $200 billion. It’s expected to reach $503 billion by 2030 with an annual growth rate (CAGR 2024-2030) of 36.08%.
Under the umbrella of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning is a compelling data analytics method that enables computers to learn from algorithms and data, simulating how people acquire information. Its applications are in various sectors, including manufacturing, automotive, retail, and healthcare.
The increasing implementation of AI and machine learning technologies across these industries would significantly influence the market’s growth. The demand for machine learning technology is anticipated to skyrocket, supporting additional market expansion as enterprises increasingly grasp the advantages of integrating AI and ML solutions.
For effective project planning, keeping up with the most recent developments in machine learning is essential. It gives people access to cutting-edge innovations, boosts performance and competitiveness, strengthens problem-solving skills, optimizes resource use, reduces risks, and encourages teamwork. By remaining informed, businesses can make wise decisions, stay one step ahead of the competition, and utilize the most recent advancements in machine learning for their use cases.
This article examines six of the most important trends driving enterprise Machine Learning development.
Adversarial attacks intentionally introduce precisely constructed input data into machine learning algorithms. These attacks seek to trick the model into producing false or unintended outputs by taking advantage of weaknesses in its decision-making process. Adversarial attacks can take many forms, like subtly altering input attributes or adding imperceptible disturbances to images.
Adversarial attacks have a substantial potential impact on machine learning models. These attacks, if successful, could have devastating effects across several industries. An adversarial assault, for instance, may force an autonomous vehicle’s object recognition system to incorrectly identify pedestrians or road signs, creating potentially dangerous scenarios. Similarly, hackers may try to get past spam or intrusion detection systems by creating adversarial samples that trick the models into misclassifying harmful inputs as benign.
To improve model security and reduce associated risks, researchers and practitioners have created methodologies and strategies to protect against adversarial attacks. These include negative training, which increases robustness by exposing models to benign and aggressive samples during movement. Using methods like normalization, scaling, or noise reduction, input sanitization entails cleaning and sanitizing input data to remove potential adversarial perturbations.
Model assembling integrates various models to provide predictions, enhancing defense against attacks by utilizing diversity. To offer dependable and accurate predictions even in hostile situations, certified defenses use mathematical frameworks like robust optimization or interval analysis to establish formal guarantees of model robustness.
Validating the efficacy of defense mechanisms requires testing and evaluating model resilience in real-world circumstances. Organizations should conduct thorough assessments to ensure their machine-learning models function dependably and safely when implemented in real-world settings.
“Automated Machine Learning,” or “AutoML,” refers to a collection of methods and equipment that automate different stages in the machine learning process. It includes automating tasks like feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and model evaluation. Its main advantage is AutoML’s ability to expedite and streamline the entire machine-learning cycle. Data scientists and engineers may focus on higher-level work like evaluating results, comprehending domain-specific requirements, and making strategic decisions by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. AutoML also democratizes machine learning by lowering the entry difficulties to creating powerful machine learning models, making it accessible for non-experts.
A crucial phase in machine learning is feature engineering, which involves extracting or transforming useful features from raw data. The performance of a model can be greatly impacted by automated feature engineering. Hence it is crucial. Organizations can save time and money by automating this process, as manual feature engineering can be time-consuming and require specialized knowledge. Automated procedures can create various characteristics and spot patterns that human engineers would overlook. The accuracy and generalization of models trained on autonomously generated features may improve, resulting in enhanced prediction capabilities.
AutoML and automated feature engineering can be efficiently implemented using various tools and platforms. These strategies are more widely adopted thanks to these platforms, which cater to users with multiple experience levels. Google AutoML is one of the most well-known AutoML platforms, and it provides user-friendly interfaces and automated processes for activities like image categorization, natural language processing, and more. The entire machine learning process, from the preparation of the data through the model deployment, is automated by DataRobot, another frequently used platform. The AutoML framework from H2O.ai is an additional noteworthy platform that offers complete automated solutions for model construction and hyperparameter optimization.
While using AutoML and automated feature engineering in machine learning projects has many benefits, there are a few things to consider. The most important factor remains the caliber of the input data. Automated systems rely heavily on the data supplied, and employing low-quality data can provide deceptive or erroneous outcomes. Second, when using completely computerized systems, interpretability becomes a problem. It’s crucial to comprehend how a model makes decisions, especially in complex areas like banking or healthcare.
A decentralized computing paradigm called edge computing delivers data processing near the data source or the end user. Edge computing performs computations locally on edge devices, such as IoT devices, gateways, or edge servers, rather than forwarding all data to a centralized cloud infrastructure for processing. This method is beneficial for machine learning applications because it has several benefits. Machine learning models can make real-time judgments by analyzing data at the edge, greatly lowering latency and enhancing responsiveness. This is essential for applications that need to take fast action, like autonomous vehicles or real-time monitoring systems. Additionally, edge computing improves data privacy and security because delicate data can be processed locally rather than sent to a distant server.
Using machine learning models on edge devices has several advantages for businesses. They can, first and foremost, take advantage of the more potent and energy-efficient processing capabilities of edge devices. Organizations may reduce their dependency on cloud connectivity by running models locally, making applications more resilient in places with spotty or erratic internet connectivity. This is crucial in difficult or distant regions, workplaces, and areas with limited bandwidth. Edge AI also eliminates the lag time in transferring data to a remote server and waiting for a response, enabling real-time inference and decision-making. This is essential for applications that require quick reactions and improved user experience.
To implement edge AI, it is necessary to solve issues with edge devices’ restricted computational power and energy, which may limit the size and complexity of deployed machine learning models. Fitting edge device constraints require balancing the model size and inference speed. Managing model updates and security is difficult, which requires reliable update systems and data privacy safeguards. To realize the advantages of edge computing in machine learning projects, organizations must carefully assess these factors while installing edge AI, choosing suitable models, optimizing architectures, and putting in place efficient communication protocols.
A machine learning concept called “lifelong learning” imitates how people can keep learning and changing in response to new experiences and information. It goes beyond conventional machine learning paradigms like static training and inference, enabling models to update and advance their knowledge over time. Machine learning systems can assimilate new data, learn from it, and improve task comprehension through lifetime learning. This flexibility is crucial in dynamic environments where data and contexts change.
Machine learning relies heavily on continuous learning because it enables models to stay useful and applicable in settings where the data and context are continually changing. Data distributions may change over time, new classes may appear, or the significance of attributes may vary in real-world applications. Machine learning models can adjust to these changes and retain their effectiveness by continuously learning from fresh data.
Thanks to continuous learning, models can deal with idea drift, in which the connections between features and target variables alter over time. Models can more effectively handle concept drift and produce precise predictions in dynamic circumstances by routinely updating their knowledge.
Continuous AI has many useful applications and advantages in numerous industries. Lifelong learning in recommendation systems enables models to adjust to consumers’ tastes, offering individualized and current recommendations. Continuous learning can help adaptive systems, like smart assistants or chatbots, better understand their users and respond to their changing demands.
Lifelong learning in intelligent automation enables models to gain knowledge from experience and improve workflows over time, resulting in higher precision and efficiency. Another use for continuous AI is anomaly detection, where models can adapt to different kinds of anomalies and maintain a high detection rate even in changing situations.
Some time ago, a global online survey and insights pure play company reached out to us for help building an AI-based solution that would enable them to identify and track human behaviors inside a retail store without breaching confidentiality.
We built a three-person team to build and train a custom ML model that can detect and recognize everyone in the store and create standalone videos from the surveillence footage based on the person, location, tag, and other parameters.
On the one hand, our custom ML solution helped the Client reduce 10K hours of video surveillence to just 2 hours of highly targeted footage. On the other hand, it helped the Client’s team to save 90% of time needed to codify video for individual behavior tracking.
You can learn more about this project here.
The current and next generations of connected devices with built-in sensors for collecting biometric data are some of the most sophisticated ML models you can create today.
Machine learning is an ever-evolving process that requires large, varied, and carefully labeled datasets to train ML algorithms. But collecting and labeling datasets with millions of items taken from the real world is time-consuming and expensive. This has drawn attention to synthetic data as the preferred training tool.
Synthetic data is information generated by computer simulations, not collected or measured in the real world. Although artificial, it should reflect real-world data and have the same mathematical and statistical properties. Unlike real-world data, ML specialists have complete control over a synthetic dataset. This allows them to control the degree of marking, sample size, and noise level. It also helps address privacy and security concerns when real-world data use is associated with confidential and personal information.
Synthetic data makes it much easier for ML practitioners to publish, share and analyze synthetic datasets with the broader ML community without worrying about personal information disclosure and the wrath of data protection authorities. Synthetic data is widely used in self-driving vehicles, robotics, healthcare, cybersecurity, and fraud protection.
Google and Uber use it extensively to improve autonomy in their self-driving cars. Similarly, Amazon reportedly uses synthetic data to train its Alexa language tool.
According to Gartner, synthetic data can:
Machine learning professionals need to keep a few things in mind to get the most out of synthetic data. First, they need to make sure that the dataset adequately emulates their use case and adequately represents the production environment in terms of the examples’ complexity and completeness.
They also need to make sure the data is clean. But what’s more important –ML professionals need to understand that applying synthetic data may not work in their particular case. Our rinf.tech AI developers stress that determining if synthetic data can potentially solve the problem is paramount. This assessment should be done before launching an ML project and should never be an afterthought.
Transfer learning is an ML research problem that focuses on retaining knowledge gained from solving one problem and applying it to another, related problem. For example, the knowledge gained from learning to recognize cars can be applied when trying to recognize trucks.
The essence of transfer learning is to reuse existing trained ML models to take advantage of the development of new models. This is especially useful for data science teams working with supervised ML algorithms who need labeled datasets for accurate analysis. Rather than starting a new supervised ML model, data scientists can use transmission alignment to tune models for a given business goal quickly.
Additionally, transfer learning modules are becoming increasingly relevant in process-oriented industries that rely on computer vision because of their scale for labeled data. ML platforms offering transfer learning include Alteryx, Google, IBM, SAS, TIBCO, and others.
Organizations must focus primarily on use cases and metrics and understand that extreme model accuracy may not deliver business value.
One of the most common problems when building supervised machine learning models, especially when there is a lot of telemetry from sensors and endpoints, is the tendency to constantly tune the models to get another degree of accuracy. Factory floor telemetry data can be sporadic and vary depending on the number of cycles, the frequency and speed of a particular machine, and many other factors.
It’s easy to get carried away by what the real-time telemetry data from the manufacturing floor says about the machines. Still, backtracking to see what the data says about factory floor productivity and its impact on profit needs to remain the focus as a primary target.
Machine learning went through its testing phase a couple of years ago and is now used in most industries. ML has so many different learning models that make it versatile enough to be used in many fields. However, the problem arises when you have many models to focus on or insufficient and poor-quality data to use for ML models training.
To do this, you need help managing your model. In addition, you need help defining the right ML platforms and tools whose capabilities will be best tailored to your business goals and needs.
Hiring an external team of AI consultants or joining forces with an ML-specialized custom software development provider can be a more cost-effective and efficient option than developing and training models in-house. Besides money, you can save time due to learning curve elimination, the provider’s access to synthetic datasets and pre-trained models, and a pool of top DS and AI dev talent that your in-house recruitment team or local agency may have difficulty finding and hiring fast enough to ensure short time to market.
This article highlights the key reasons for AI project failures and suggests strategies for success.
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